The Art of Listening: Marlboro Musicians Bring Their Craft to the Berkley Theater Stage

By Emma Barhydt

When the Musicians from Marlboro perform at Greenwich Library’s Berkley Theater on November 23, they’ll arrive with a lineage that stretches back more than seventy years to the hills of southern Vermont. Since its founding in 1951 by pianist Rudolf Serkin and a group of European émigrés, Marlboro Music has been less an institution than a gathering—a place where generations of artists have come to think together about sound, form, and the unspoken discipline of playing well with others.

That approach shows in the programs the ensemble brings on tour. This month’s concert includes Britten’s Phantasy Quartet , Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 , and Mendelssohn’s String Quintet in A Major —works that, taken together, form a kind of conversation across time. Each asks